


What did it mean to be shipping Steve Rogers?

by Anonymous



Category: Avengers: Endgame - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Meta - Fandom, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Academic Essays, Allonormativity, Audience Studies, F/M, Fan Studies, Gen, I did research again, M/M, MLA format because TCW's not my mom, Meta, Other Fandom(s) Mentioned, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Queer Erasure, Spoilers for the MCU through Avengers: Endgame, The concept of shipping, There's a bibliography, amatonormativity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:47:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29105823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Bisexual Main Character.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter/Peggy Carter's Husband, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Poe Dameron & Finn (Star Wars), Poe Dameron/Finn
Kudos: 2
Collections: Anonymous, Banned Together Bingo 2020





	What did it mean to be shipping Steve Rogers?

**Author's Note:**

> `Bisexual Main Character`.

When people discuss what I know as fandom - which is hardly the only kind, but if you're reading this on the Archive of Our Own you likely know what I mean, and if you're not reading this on AO3 one hopes you may imagine what it would mean to be reading this on AO3, starting with who something of _"our own_ " here belongs to - when people discuss what I know as fandom, one way or another, they end up talking about romantic relationships. Sometimes it's the disparaging (but increasingly old-fashioned, at least), gendered assertion that fans are unreasonably obsessed with romance (and/or sexuality). Sometimes it's a reclamation of that same put-down - using the prominence of shipping, and of describing investment in characters and stories in terms of how they relate to one another in general, as proof that _real_ fans care about _people_. Often it's just accepted as settled fact without further examination, which might promote the impression that everyone wants the same things out of their fictional depictions of relationships (and their relationships with fictional depictions) most of all.

As such, when people were attempting to articulate in the wake of _Avengers: Endgame_ why part of the audience was unhappy - not bittersweet-sad or tragedy-sad about events _within_ the film, but dissatisfied, betrayed, or disappointed with the MCU itself - they went for "the Stucky shippers got the short end of the stick" and had done. This is, in my opinion, so simplistic as to be wrong, despite theoretically being accurate in whose disappointment it centers: the idea of relationships, of expectations, and of fandom implied by it all tilt over time towards being wrong. Insofar as what people use the words "ship" and "shipping" to mean: it wasn't just about the ship per se at all, and that matters.

To be clear, **there would be nothing wrong with people being disappointed that their emotional investment in a piece of media backfired for them if it _were_ 'just' about shipping in the simplest sense.** Rather, the shoehorning of all forms of interest and investment capable of conflicting with canon on the part of fans into more abstract questions of representation and demographics is a subtle example of devaluing that investment _for_ shippers as well. It is strangely easy, it seems, to forget the "relationship" part - or to forget that fandom itself _is_ a relationship and that's why people are here in the first place. 

Why is that?

Most ships don't 'happen', one way or another - from a statistical perspective, from a time-onscreen perspective, and from the perspective of professionally produced media leaning exclusively heterosexual (and monogamous). The seeming impossibility of canonical queer romantic/sexual relationships lend an extra incentive for people to explore that lens in fanwork (and fan discourses more generally); to refer to a wider gamut of relationships _as_ implied-romantic ships if they'd otherwise be on an aro, ace, and/or unconventional fence; and to think of them as a sort of shorthand for would-if-they-could-but-they-can't desires from canon. (This is part of what leads to such a deep generational division in what people think "shipping" means - despite the original "relationshippers" having wanted, and eventually gotten, their pairing to be in a canonical romantic relationship onscreen, the more common usage in decades since has been mediated by the assumption that fandom is queer and media is not.)

That status quo is increasingly unstable, however, as queer representation in media becomes more thinkable at all, simultaneously fast enough to cause seismic shifts in how different generations of fandom unspokenly define shipping and terribly, unjustly slow. The possibility but lack of likelihood of 'something', anything, puts people on edge with simultaneous hope and tension, reasonably so - while also dragging the fraught question of (canonical) "representation", with everything it indexes that this margin is an order of magnitude too narrow to contain, into the spotlight. 

When it comes to canonicity of (for example) same-gender romantic/sexual/non-platonic relationships, for example, we run immediately into how difficult it is to prove a negative. Many (most?) shippers are drawn to a pairing (or more) because they are interested in either the characters' dynamic as depicted, or (for ships with minimal canon interaction to go off of) the potential dynamics they could have if only the plot were to allow it. 

One straightforwardly extreme example of this dynamic was openly admitted to by Rian Johnson after _Star Wars: The Last Jedi_ : while he'd considered showcasing the relationship between Poe Dameron and Finn established among the central drivers of _The Force Awakens_ , he ultimately split the characters up instead on the grounds that said relationship was _too_ engaging, that "those two get along too well" and he didn't know what to do with them (Jasper). The resulting movie greatly disappointed Stormpilot shippers, of course; on a structural level, it was occupied with diminishing the characters' relationship - whatever form that relationship may have - both by reducing its importance to the plot and by preventing them from interacting onscreen. 

While this is a more-or-less known issue, even to the point that (before Johnson admitted his motives) one common hypothesis was that this was a product of Disney/LucasFilm executive meddling, arguments on the subject generally gravitate toward the question of queerbaiting versus representation. Certainly there's an element of what it's hard not to consider homophobia involved when homosocial interaction is that far out of the question - _'fellas, is it gay to have male friends?'_ The fact that _TLJ_ couldn't countenance depicting much of the relationship that had been centered in, and caught on from, _TFA_ was an active choice to walk that _backwards_ , not simply an aversion. Queerbaiting would require will-they-or-won't-they teasing; representation would require confirmation. People invested in the relationship between characters first and foremost are prone to wanting _interaction_ \- denying that means denying the relationship as written should have continued to matter to the characters involved. It's not just a failure to develop in one direction or another but a conscious form of regression. However, discontent with that regression - the rendering irrelevant of what would seem to be a meaningful connection, in disguise as neutrality - gets attached to a specific, archetypal subtype of shippers only, disguising just how much of a deviation from the existing text is happening by saying the only people disappointed are ones who were waiting for something entirely different.

In my own life, the sense of stigma and resentment of "shippers" as "people who want their ships to be canon" today was such that it took me months to understand why, by contrast, in a third fandom, the creative team saying they were on board with my own OTP made me _happy_. I didn't have a standpoint to understand that as a good thing from - not least with this being in the context of it staying word-of-god as opposed to changing their relationship in the canon. But that turns out to have been the operative issue: the recognition of that relationship between characters as one that could be read romantic/sexual/shippy in the text as already written _was_ the revolutionary thing for me. It served the function of unexpectedly confirming that, in the scenes we had already seen, an interpretation of those characters' interactions as being interesting, important, and meaningful to them made sense to the creators - not changing something about what I'd engaged with to produce a relationship of 'something more', but concurring that there was already room and reason for that reading in the first place. (The opposite, in other words, of Johnson's recognition of an existing, important relationship as something to avoid engaging with and its knock-on effects on what character acts and motivations end up depicted.) 

A relationship "becoming" canon under a certain type and label requires that the text make choices about when it 'starts' and 'happens', still meaning that some readings of characters as already having been intimately invested with one another will be reframed as unreasonable, overreaching, projection, or called too early. For the existing relationship that all of us were already looking at in the first place to functionally _have been_ canon during the time the audience who shipped it was reading it as such was subtly distinct - but illuminatingly so. It wouldn't work for all relationships for a fast-track to 'legitimization' of their being read as existing to take this form, of course; nothing works for all relationships the same way! But I hadn't seen, before, a way to approach "yes, this relationship _could be_ something other than platonic (implied: incidental)" without requiring the adjunct "(it wasn't, before, when you were thinking about it, though; that was still you thinking things only)."

Meanwhile - back at our core example - attempting to explain what was wrong with _Endgame_ for an interested lay audience, Burt approaches the prospect of Steve's 'resolution' as a failure to honor the character's existing emotional/social relationships and commitments: "for a movie that is so much about Steve Rogers, and that ostensibly wraps up his story forever, _Endgame_ is disappointingly short on . . . the relationship between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, a dynamic that has been foundational to the Captain America story in both the comics and the MCU." Except what I just elided in the middle of that statement about a lack of continuation - emotional continuity - with the rest of the story as it stands is, itself, telling: that second half of the statement is Burt defining 'Stucky', the traditional mushed ship name for the two of them as a romantic pairing. Before Burt's article instead veers into finding a way to divide fandom into two binary genders and then lay the blame for this storytelling failure at the feet of what's considered the bad kind of fan as a result, she's explicitly laid out the extent to which Stucky fandom, in particular, has seen themselves as wanting/acting on only what's already there; after, giving an overview of the relationship as written, the arc she's describing is 'merely' the canonical one, illustrating just how hard it fell flat. 

It's still possible, of course, to argue that there's a meaningful difference (beyond queerness, rating, and genre) between the shipper's view of the canon story and the story itself - after all, shippers label themselves with the importance that relationship has to them, and ( _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ notwithstanding) an original or franchise work won't usually pitch itself on the basis of a relationship as opposed to some other plot, especially outside the romance genre. Similarly, one of the cornerstones of fanfiction metadata is the relationship field - so doesn't that indicate some especial investment on the part of people who read and write fanfiction, the argument goes, that they want to know that up front when other mediums wouldn't bring it up?

But they do. Sometimes by way of common knowledge: a layperson doesn't need to know the plot of any version of the concept-album-turned-musical _Hadestown_ to anticipate, if told that four out of the five voiced main characters are Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades, and Persephone, what plot-driving romantic relationships they will be looking at; familiarity with the existence of Greek myth will do that. By contrast, no one would _learn_ anything actionable from the header line `Baru Cormorant | Agonist/Tain Hu | Duchess Vultjag, Baru Cormorant | Agonist & Cairdine Farrier | Itinerant, Baru Cormorant & Aminata isiSegu, One-Sided/Unrequited Baru Cormorant | Agonist/Muire Lo` if the names there don't mean something to them already; the characters of _The Traitor Baru Cormorant_ are revealed and defined over the course of the novel I've just partially described, by the ways they interact, in a way that would render that list of names meaningful - after, and not before, such identifying information was revealed. Relationship tags as we know them, and as emerge from the concept of coherent acts of 'shipping' done by 'shippers', tell us something because we already know who's involved. The most meaningful relationship at hand isn't character-character but reader-context.

Absent that kind of information, we're looking at noise over the signal of an announcement that the central relationship of a novel is `Original Female Character/Original Female Character`. Which is a kind of information about relationships, and a level of detail, that people do in fact use to pitch the Masquerade series on, sometimes to a fault. The counterpoint to that focus ("what's the genre, though?" "you weren't listening, I said there's lesbians") being something I think we're all familiar with by way of mocking it: the expectation that most stories have a romantic B-plot, that the romantic B-plot be heterosexual, and just in general that some straight ship naturally emerge into canon by dint of a story running for long enough. The focus on romantic relationships to the exclusion of all else - using them as a shorthand to indicate intimacy and meaning at best, and denying other forms of importance at worst - is, by all accounts, coming from outside the house after all.

 _Avengers: Endgame_ takes this to almost parodic levels: in order to prioritize Steve's relationship with Peggy Carter, he must literally cut himself off from everyone else he knows and - for fans invested in those relationships - was supposed to care about as well, as if taking the dysfunctional allo/amatonormative belief that one's partner should be one's entire social life to its greatest possible height. For some people, looking for a bookend of Steve interacting with Peggy again that linear time wasn't going to produce, this was fulfilling - _look,_ it could seem to say, _this does get to matter, after all._ But that mattering happened straightforwardly at the expense of the rest of his entire life - of course the sense of whether it was worth it, and whether it felt genuine, varied from fan to fan on the basis of what they thought that life was made of.

As a result, _Endgame_ made people who shipped something other than Steve/Peggy exclusively, and people who were otherwise invested in those characters' relationships in ways less easily summarized, come at the 'happy' 'ending' from a position that asked, "...but what about his other meaningful relationships this means abandoning?" (More than that, _those two groups aren't mutually exclusive_ , and may be outright indistinguishable - they meaningfully overlap, and operate in a kind of fandom environment that encourages this interplay.) That sense of a missing stair in the story triggers a cascading failure of suspension of disbelief, regardless of their feelings on the ship that 'was' canonized 'instead'. (If anything, what I've seen is that people this disappointed with Steve's arc - and with how his arc veers away from the people they thought were important to him - by and large believe it's doing a disservice to his relationship with Peggy as a result, as well: who is this man she married, then, if he's abruptly become a stranger to them en route?) What's summarized as the future-facing "they wanted their ship to be canon" is instead something that ripples backwards to disrupt the canon to date.

Ultimately, the people dissatisfied with Steve's arc in _Endgame_ is a much wider set than "the Stucky shippers who weren't happy", and - even, perhaps especially, for the shippers themselves - summarizing the problem as "their ship wasn't canon" is deceptive at best. For people invested in literally any other relationship he had as a character, something in the text - actual or potential or allusion - had made them care, before, in a way that carried their emotional commitment to the character and the series forward. While shortsighted defenses of fandom and shipping, the sort that don't look any further forward at their own effects than 'maybe now I will be left alone', reduce audience investment to arbitrary "banging dolls together" and seek to somehow detach being fans-of from fans, people will continue caring about characters and their relationships largely as a result of the text as a starting point. Any sense of the canon saying, in response to "and what's this set of characters doing?", "no they're not, that set isn't meaningful", has far wider ramifications for storytelling that our flippant and defensive language around shipping sells short.

Fandom shares with our wider culture the tendency to use romantic relationships, whenever possible, to indicate or shorthand importance - it does not create it. And boiling things in established universes down to _only_ a question of representation in the abstract - simultaneously interchangeable and considered completely distinct from the text as it already stands - overlooks just why and how fans care about these people, specifically, in the first place.

**Author's Note:**

> **Bibliography**
> 
> Burt, Kayti. "Why Avengers: Endgame's Sidelining of the Steve & Bucky Relationship Matters." _Den of Geek_ , 31 Jul. 2019, <https://denofgeek.com/movies/why-avengers-endgame-sidelining-stucky-matters>
> 
> Jasper, Marykate. "Rian Johnson Had to Separate Finn and Poe in _The Last Jedi_ Because 'Those Two Get Along Too Well.'" _The Mary Sue_ , 3 Feb. 2018, <https://www.themarysue.com/rian-johnson-poe-finn-canto-bight/>


End file.
